Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz

Frank Drake was born in Chicago, in 1930, and trained in astronomy. He was one of the first scientists to treat with method a question that, until then, belonged to fiction: is there anyone else out there?

The no

The no, in this case, was the universe itself. In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published a paper in Nature proposing that, if any civilization wanted to be heard, it would probably use the frequency of the hydrogen line, 1420 MHz, because any being that studied the cosmos would know it.

Drake, who worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Green Bank, in the United States, decided to test the idea. On April 8, 1960, he pointed a 26-meter antenna at the star Tau Ceti and, later, at Epsilon Eridani, and listened around 1420 MHz. It was Project Ozma. Over months, the telescope made about 200 hours of observation.

He heard nothing. There was a strong signal in the first days, which excited the team; days later, they found it was interference of human origin. The result of Project Ozma was silence.

What they did

The silence didn't close anything. It opened. In November 1961, Drake organized at Green Bank the first scientific meeting on intelligent life beyond Earth and wrote on a board an equation estimating how many civilizations capable of communicating might exist in our galaxy. It became known as the Drake equation, and it still organizes the field's questions today.

Drake helped create the Arecibo message, in 1974, and took part in the plaques on the Pioneer probes, which use the hydrogen line as a universal unit of measure. He died on September 2, 2022, at 92. The search he began goes on.

What this has to do with Bairo

The project Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded is called 1420, after the same frequency Drake listened to. For science, it's the hydrogen line, the most abundant element in the universe. To protect that extremely faint signal, the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union: there, emissions are prohibited, and one only listens. No one transmits on it, not even Bairo's project.

Bairo calls 1420 MHz the frequency of silence. Drake's story shows why the name fits: the first result was silence, and the silence became a starting point. For Bairo, it's the same gesture as his rule for life: no is the foundation of yes. The project's name is a symbol, and it's as a symbol that he carries it. It's in The frequency of silence.

Linked dates: April 8, Project Ozma · March 25, the detection of the line · April 15, the prediction

Sources

• Project Ozma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ozma
• Sky & Telescope, "Project Ozma: The First SETI": https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/
• Cosmic Search, "A Reminiscence of Project Ozma" (Frank Drake): https://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/ozma.htm
• SETI Institute, Drake Equation: https://www.seti.org/research/seti-101/drake-equation/
• National Geographic, death of Frank Drake (2022): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/frank-drake-pioneer-in-the-search-for-alien-life-dies-at-92
• ITU, footnote RR 5.340 (summary of radio astronomy allocations): https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf